Tooling

With Super Bowl XL a week away, it's a mad dash in downtown Detroit to get shit done and cleaned up. A lot of streets have already been closed and there appears to be scaffolding and trucks everywhere.

I screwed around downtown a little bit on Saturday, shooting some restaurants and doing a little bit of freelance housekeeping. Poked my head into The Woodward, this new, style-y kind of restaurant slated to open today inside of the Campus Martius Building. No menus available, but the inside looked sharp, a lot of slate rock, wood appointments, very sleek, but not too stuffy. I spent some time on foot, which is always good, not to mention good for you.

I putzed around in New Center for a little bit, shooting the new Frank Taylor restaurant, Grand City Grille, before taking the Lodge service drive back north. It turns into Hamilton, which is a street I’ve never before been on. Interesting, to say the very least. Lots of fucked up-looking buildings and people everywhere.

It was a nice day and an unusual amount of people were out, but they were mainly punks and derelicts, none of them friendly by even a modicum of means. I get really tired of ghetto territorialism. This is MY neighborhood. YOU are not welcomed here. I’ve been getting that trip since the day I moved to Detroit. As a young journalist I once covered this protest outside of a Detroit supermarket. Some community group was giving the owner a hard time for selling old, outdated food, but the neighbors were having nothing of it. A group of them nearly pummeled the protestors, as well as the press covering the event, namely me. I thought it was curtains for the Chicken with this big dude up in my shit with both feet, talking about “We don’t even want you motherfuckers here!” I would’ve left on the spot, but I had a job to do and I stayed to do it. It was quite the exercise/lesson in ghetto mentality. Fine with me. Keep your rotted fruit, green meat and 40-dogs on credit. Knock yourself the fuck out. So when I was coming up Hamilton Saturday, I got my fair share of shitty looks, especially when I’d park, get out and take some shots, paying extra special attention to the dude by the bus stop and estimating that it’s about, oh, 100 feet between me and the weirdo over by the corner. Hawing about whether I wanted to shoot one building in particular, I kept circling back before finally doing it, much to the chagrin of a guy having a sidewalk sale consisting of old doors, broken shoelaces and his pancreas. By the third time passing, he kept mad-dogging me, finally standing up from his seat and yelling at me. Don’t worry fella, I’ll leave you and your pocket full of piss alone soon enough. With that kind of attitude, you deserve to have shit like this on your block. Bitch.